true, but that also doesn't mean that the Sunni Islamist insurgents are the only problem, or even the biggest problem.

Quote:

Which goes back to the problem with Bush - spouts about Democracy and Liberty while helping to stifle it in neighbouring countries, not taking the non-military means to guarantee the gains made, not courting progressives in the region - and after this presidency America is just going to swing back to the same old stability doctrine and nothing will have changed except half a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

or we could just say that the problem with Bush is that he's an incompetent buffoon.

And they say that Democrats are mindless partisan Bush bashers :wink:

[q]5 Stages of Neocon Grief

1. Denial: “The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq.”

2. Anger: “The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq.”

3. Bargaining: “If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours.”

4. Depression: “Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta.”

5. Advanced Literary Theory: “The hegemonic binary of ’success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq.”[/q]

No one has ever claimed that there is a purely military solution to the problem of nation building and counter insurgency in either Afghanistan or Iraq. But there is no solution that will succeed without a military element to help implement it.

I never said that Iraq's problem is Al Quada. Al Quada is a huge problem for the United States and Al Quada will be in an even better position if the United States withdraws all of its combat forces immediately as Democrats are proposing. Even without an Al Quada element in Iraq, its still important to US security that Iraq develop a stable non-hostile government that can provide its own internal security. Much more important than the same operation going on in Afghanistan.


What are the potential consequences of the rapid withdrawal the Democrats are proposing? Who will replace the vital task being performed by coalition combat troops on a daily basis in Iraq? How does giving Al Quada a virtual safe haven in Al Anbar province through the withdrawal of US combat Forces from that province improve the coalitions ability to fight Al Quada and prevent current Al Quada terrorist activity in Iraq from spreading outside Iraq?


If withdrawal were the answer, why are the Democrats not proposing withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan? Afghanistan has virtually no Al Quada activity unlike Iraq, and its stability or lack there of is not as great a threat to US security as a lack of stability in Iraq.

you're right, STING, your incompetence has left us with no good options and thousands of wasted lives.

maybe you should have thought of this?

I think it's time to get back to discussing the Presidential campaign...

:banghead:

Dissolve the standing army and bring back Letters of Marque

I meant to tape it and I forgot

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday dismissed the notion he might consider accepting the No. 2 spot on the 2008 ballot -- with Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top.

"You don't run for second. I don't believe in that," the Illinois senator said on "Late Night with David Letterman."

"That would be a powerful ticket," Letterman prodded.

"Which order are we talking?" Obama replied, drawing laughter and applause from the studio audience.

"Let's say you're the presidential candidate and Hillary is the vice presidential candidate. Now if she were sitting here, it would be different from that," Letterman joked.

Obama, a fresh face on the national stage who has served just two years in the Senate, said last week he had raised $25 million this year, almost matching Clinton and solidifying his bid for the Democratic nomination to seek the presidency in November 2008.

Obama fell only $1 million short of the higher-profile New York senator, despite the huge fund-raising network she developed through her Senate campaigns and the White House races of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Asked by Letterman whether there were private discussions of the situation going the other way, with Clinton in the No. 2 spot, Obama said the contenders were all in the race to win the party nomination but were on the same team.

"Really, what we're doing is we're trying out for quarterback," Obama said.

Letterman persisted, asking whether the senator might reconsider if it came to a point where the campaigns of the two front-runners were ripping their party apart.

Obama replied: "I think it is possible that in that kind of situation, we might have to have a brokered convention and, Dave, we might turn to you."

I like the anecdote at the end of this. Can he be for real? I hope so. I think so. I hope running for President doesn't change him.

April 8, 2007
2 Years After Big Speech, a Lower Key for Obama
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

COLO, Iowa, April 6 — Senator Barack Obama is not big on what he calls
red-meat applause lines when he campaigns in small communities like
this one, 45 miles northeast of Des Moines. He does not tell many
jokes. He talks in even, measured tones, and at times is so low-key
that he lulls his audiences into long, if respectful, silences.

Mr. Obama likes to recount the chapters of his unusual life: growing
up in Hawaii, living overseas, community organizing in Chicago,
working in the Illinois legislature, though not his years as a United
States senator. He talks — more often than not in broad, general
strokes — about an Obama White House that would provide health care to
all, attack global warming, improve education, fix Social Security and
end the war in Iraq. His campaign events end almost as an
afterthought, surprising voters used to the big finishes typically
served up by the presidential candidates seeking their support.

"Thank you very much, everybody. Have a nice day," Mr. Obama said
pleasantly in Dakota City one afternoon, with a leisurely wave of a
hand. He headed over to a table where copies of his books, brought by
audience members, had been neatly laid out, awaiting the slash of his
left-handed autograph.

For most Democrats, Mr. Obama is the Illinois senator who riveted the
Democratic National Convention with a keynote speech that marked him
as one of the most powerful speakers his party had produced in 50
years. But as Mr. Obama methodically worked his way across swaths of
rural northern Iowa — his tall figure and skin color making him stand
out at diners and veterans' homes, at high schools and community
colleges — it was clear that he is not presenting himself,
stylistically at least, the way he did two years ago when he gripped
Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.

He is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that
might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to
present a political style that contrasts with the more charged
presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from
North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

He rarely mentions President Bush, as he disparages the partisan
quarrels of Washington, and is, at most, elliptically critical of Mr.
Edwards and Mrs. Clinton when he notes that he had opposed the war in
Iraq from the start; the two of them voted to authorize the war in
2002.

His audiences are rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can
go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd. Yet Iowa is not the
Fleet Center, and this appeal — "letting people see how I think," as
Mr. Obama put it in an interview — could clearly go a long way in
drawing the support of Iowans who are turning out in huge numbers to
see him in the state where the presidential voting process will start.

"He's low-key; he speaks like a professor," said Jim Sayer, 51, a
farmer from Humboldt. "Maybe I expected more emotion. But the lower
key impresses me: He seems to be at the level that we are."

Mary Margaret Gran, a middle-school teacher who met him when he spoke
to 25 Iowans eating breakfast at a tiny diner in Colo on Friday
morning, summed up her view the moment Mr. Obama had moved on to the
next table.

"Rock star?" Ms. Gran said, offering the description herself. "That's
the national moniker. But dazzle is not what he is about at all. He's
peaceful."

Mr. Obama, wearing sunglasses as he sat in the back of a car that was
taking him to a charter plane and then on to his home in Chicago for
the Easter weekend, nodded when told what Mr. Sayer and Ms. Gran had
said about him.

"I use a different style if I'm speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up
folks pretty well," he said. "But when I'm in these town hall
settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat. I want to
give them a sense of my thought process."

Still, the emerging style of Mr. Obama as a candidate for president,
at least in a state like this with its emphasis on smaller settings,
might startle those who knew him only from the speech that made him
famous — a speech that is included prominently in the video sometimes
used to introduce him.

Yes, there are strains of the populist call of Ross Perot. "Thousands
of people across the country feel we are in this moment of time where
we might be able to take our country back," Mr. Obama said at the
Algona High School cafeteria, packed with young students and their
parents.

His language about community and shared sacrifice can be evocative of
Mario M. Cuomo's 1984 speech to the Democratic convention. "We have
responsibilities to ourselves, but we also have mutual
responsibilities, so if a child can't read so well, that matters to us
even if they are not our child," he said at V.F.W. Post 5240 in Dakota
City. Heads nodded among the people surrounding him in the
theater-in-the-round layout that he prefers.

But there is also, in a historical comparison that his supporters have
tended to resist, the cool intellectualism of Adlai Stevenson who, for
all the loyalty he inspired among many Democrats in the 1950s — some
of whom still remember him fondly — lost two presidential elections.
If Mr. Obama enters the room to the sounds of "Think" by Aretha
Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and
jostling for photographs, it is only moments before the atmosphere
turns from campaign rally to college seminar, when he talks, for
example, about the need for a "common sense, nonideological,
practical-minded, generous agenda for change in this country."

This evolution, or more precisely this attention to Mr. Obama's
credentials as a campaigner in communities like this, comes in a week
in which he has, with the report that he had nearly matched Mrs.
Clinton by raising $25 million in the first quarter of presidential
fund-raising, left no doubt that he had the resources and, presumably
the popular support, to potentially deny her the nomination.

For Mr. Obama, his reception in Iowa has certainly changed since he
came here after announcing his presidential bid in February, trailing
enough reporters, press aides, advisers, family members and friends to
fill a Boeing 767. Then, he was nearly suffocated at every campaign
event with people craning for a look or a handshake or an autograph,
or television crews shouting out a question.

This week, mostly far from the bigger cities of Iowa, there was much
less press and staff, and the crowds, while still big, were
manageable. Mr. Obama has developed a system for handling all the
people who brought copies of his books to sign. "If you can put your
name in the book and hand it to my staff after we're done, I'll sign
them all at once," he said.

Things have cooled off enough to permit Mr. Obama, dressed in his
signature open-collared white shirt and loose-hanging black sports
coat, to linger until almost the last person is gone. This more casual
setting has revealed Mr. Obama to be a tactile campaigner; his bony
hand grabbing elbows and hands, his long arms thrown over shoulders,
drawing voters close in conversation.

And it allowed for moments like one that took place at the V.F.W. Hall
in Dakota City, after almost everyone had gone. Mr. Obama was
approached by a woman, her eyes wet. She spoke into his ear and began
to weep, collapsing into his embrace. They stood like that for a full
minute, Mr. Obama looking ashen, before she pulled away. She began
crying again, Mr. Obama pulled her in for another embrace.

The woman left declining to give her name or recount their
conversation. Mr. Obama said she told him what had happened to her
20-year-old son, who was serving in Iraq.

"Her son died," he said. He paused. "What can you say? This happens to
me every single place I go."

The next day, at the rally here, Mr. Obama described the encounter for
the crowd. The woman, he said, had asked if her son's death was the
result of a mistake by the government. "And I told her the service of
our young men and women — the duty they show this country — that's
never a mistake," he said.

He paused carefully as he reflected on that encounter. "It reminds you
why you get into politics," he said. "It reminds you that this isn't a
game."

I really don't understand why all the talking heads in the media believe that Hillary is the presumed front runner. They've obviously never been south of the Mason-Dixon line, and they haven't talked to any of the people I know. To me the media's presumption of Hillary as the nominee shows what a bubble they live in. Her poll numbers are name recognition, and her fundraising is the work of her husband more than herself.


Or maybe I'm the one in the bubble :shrug:

I think there are 3 co-front runners right now, U2Democrat. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. They're all pretty close together in the polls, and Obama and Clinton are close in fundraising, with Edwards not far behind.

Oh I agree, but the media is so shocked by Obama and Edwards keeping up with Hillary and I don't understand why they are so surprised.

I think each Democratic candidate is trying to position themselves as NOT being the front-runner. It's always nicer to be the "little guy" who comes from behind and rallies to defeat the heavily-favored candidate (a la Bill Clinton in the '92 primary).

As a Hillary supporter, I'm glad people are finally beginning to stop referring to her as the presumptive winner.

[q]The former mayor never mentioned his position on gay rights and abortion that separate him from traditional Republican voters in the state, but he said he would always be straight with voters.[/q]



https://www.covenantnews.com/giulianidrag.jpg

From the NY Times.

:huh:

With all that money on hand
you know those guys would love to go down to Fashion Week
https://ohjoy.blogs.com/my_weblog/images/fashionweek.jpg

Romney could shop for some new wives

and Rudy could shop for some new outfits.

https://www.silt3.com/photos/giuliani_in_drag.jpg

Oh dammit. I was just going to make a thread poking fun of Rudy's "outfits."

https://amcop.blogspot.com/giuliani%20drag.jpg

What Would Reagan Do?

I agree. It's a pain in the neck being the front runner this early in the game.